TALK ABOUT THE TURD ON THE TABLE
While the first two chapters talk about the dominance of machines, screens, and data, the third suggests that (1) opportunities exist to counteract this dominance and restore the balance between the story and the spreadsheet, and (2) restoring this balance isn’t only good for employees but for organizations as a whole. Once companies understand what constitutes meaningful work, they can design programs and policies to promote it.
In this section I suggest actions every organization can take to restore balance. The good news is that there’s a lot companies can do; I’ve already made a number of recommendations, such as humanizing the data (chapter 1), limiting screen time (chapter 2), and infusing meaning (chapter 3).
Here I will provide seven overarching steps corresponding to each chapter in this section—steps that can take companies closer to the story-spreadsheet ideal. These steps can be adopted by anyone wanting to be more successful in this endeavor, whether they’re a new employee, manager, or CEO.
You probably can’t anticipate what I’m going to suggest. They go beyond the obvious advice. Some are idealistic. Some are iconoclastic. And some are provocative, as the title of this chapter suggests. All of them, though, are user-friendly, and I strongly recommend you start putting them to use in your own organization.
Talking about It Before the S*** Hits the Fan
This chapter’s title has its origin in a meeting I had many years ago with Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe.1 We were discussing how our two organizations might work together. I knew that we were facing a big obstacle to partnering: at the time we were fringe competitors, but our future growth paths would intensify the competition. Though we avoided this touchy subject initially, it loomed increasingly large in my mind. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“We need to address the turd on the table,” I said.
I wasn’t sure how Shantanu would react, but fortunately he said, “I am so glad you brought up what I was thinking about, and you brought it up so elegantly.”
The meeting became highly productive after that; we were free to speak openly and honestly about subjects of mutual interest without holding back ideas, information, and opinions.
Pardon the distasteful metaphor, but as I think you’ll see, it’s apt. Instinctively, you may know the turd on the table that is confronting your organization or team—it’s an unpleasant but highly significant subject that everyone would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.2 It can take many forms:
• Mismanagement. For instance, management (particular leaders or leadership teams) is disconnected from reality and refusing to acknowledge the facts—or they’re guilty of bullying, discrimination, or harassment. These are incredibly touchy issues, since the former means confronting powerful people in denial and the latter means addressing an individual’s unethical or immoral behaviors.
• Toxic cultures. Organizations are highly defensive about their cultures, even when they become cultlike and inflexible or fear-driven. Telling a leader that the culture has become poisoned requires courage.
• Financial improprieties. Here, the problem may be a company overinflating revenue, such as Enron, or one that takes short-term measures to goose the numbers, such as Wells Fargo. Confronting these improprieties that have major short-term benefits and may involve illegal or unethical actions is a challenge.
• Major industry shifts. A leader may refuse to address big changes in customer behavior, or the competitive landscape, or mammoth technology changes requiring tough decisions (such as Kodak and digital emergence). It’s easier to rationalize or deny shifts than articulate the business-altering trend and the need for rethinking everything.
• People problems. The boss or some person with influence is acting like a jerk, or is playing favorites, or is blind to internal or external developments. In many ways, this is the biggest turd on the table, in that it requires confronting a powerful individual about his or her issues.
Leaders can also address the turd on the table externally rather than internally. A small minority of leaders are willing to be outspoken and raise what Al Gore has termed “inconvenient truth.” I like to count myself among these leaders. For instance, I recently told a meeting of advertising industry executives that advertising spending would decline between 20 percent and 30 percent over the next five years.3 This prediction was pounced on by print and digital media, and a MediaPost reporter noted that I was making an “ironic prediction for an ad executive whose title is chief growth officer.”4
I suppose it was ironic, but more than that, it was a provocation designed to surface a huge issue in the industry that few wanted to confront. My intent was to disabuse marketers of their long-held belief that they could depend on mass advertising to build brands. The whole point of calling attention to the turd on the table, whether it’s inside or outside a company, is to stimulate frank discussions and fresh thinking about how to deal with the issue. The initial articulation of the unpleasant subject can evoke a negative, defensive reaction, but in most cases, it will produce positive results eventually.
The Reluctance to Verbalize Tough Truths
In spreadsheet-dominant organizations, people are often less than forthright. These types of companies don’t just program with code, they speak in code—they qualify their statements, sugarcoat their words, fail to disclose because of paranoia about “security.” In these cultures, leaders are always worried that a competitor is using sophisticated technology to spy on them, that hackers are going to breach their firewalls.
It’s not that all leaders of these companies consciously avoid confronting and talking about difficult issues. It’s simply that, like the stereotypical accountant or tech geek, they gravitate toward safer subjects that can be discussed factually rather than emotionally. A spreadsheet-focused mentality promotes fear and magical thinking.
Common Fears
BEING PUNISHED. You’ve heard the phrase “Don’t kill the messenger”? In spreadsheet cultures, people who bring up messy, problematic subjects tend to draw the ire of others in the room. If it can’t be dealt with logically and analytically—if it causes people to feel upset, embarrassed, or confused—then raising these issues creates consternation. And sometimes it creates condemnation. People are afraid of being punished—verbally reprimanded or worse—for talking about difficult subjects. For instance, they don’t want to address how the CEO intimidates everyone or how the CIO’s tendency to play favorites is lowering morale.
BEING WRONG. In a data-driven world, people like accuracy and correct decisions. The reasoning goes, if you follow the data, you’ll get it right. Of course, that’s not always true. In these cultures employees are often plagued by self-doubt: Am I reading the situation right? Is there a subject flaw in my thinking? Have I analyzed the situation incorrectly? Self-doubt is a highly effective censor.
BEING ASKED TO DO MORE WORK. Or, as they warn you in some stores, “If you break it, you buy it.” People fear that if they raise problems or difficult issues, they will be asked to deal with them.
BEING DISLIKED. Truth tellers aren’t popular in spreadsheet companies, especially when they’re telling hard truths. Most employees want to be liked by their colleagues and bosses, and articulating troubling issues will get them branded as troublemakers. This is especially true if they don’t have facts and figures to back up their insights and opinions.
Magical Thinking (or the “Turd Is a Brownie” Phenomenon)
INABILITY TO SEE A TURD. When you’re viewing the data constantly and thinking about it endlessly, you’re viewing the turd through distorting, rose-colored glasses. I’ve worked with managers like this, people who are insulated by all their software and systems and benchmark developments in a formulaic manner—i.e., they always compare their performance with traditional competitors or use other established measures. As a result, they miss untraditional competitors or unmeasured innovations. They see only what their screens show them. Thus, they fail to raise problematic issues because they can’t see them clearly. At first the music industry did not see—and then did not understand—the impact of the iPod and iTunes on wresting away control of the industry; what did a technology company understand about music?
ACCEPTING DATA WITHOUT QUESTION. We take refuge in the data, believing it to be holy. We accept whatever the machine spits out and forget to ask how the data was collected and compiled, or what biases were in the algorithm. Even if our instincts are prompting us to call a turd a turd, we don’t because the data says it’s actually a brownie. Today many marketers tell me how well their online campaigns are doing and how they wish to allocate more money to these programs, despite no overall gain and often a decline in their total business. I let them know that they remind me of a patient who is getting sicker and sicker but believes the vital signs on the monitor, which seem to be glowing healthily. Could it be that they are not measuring the right thing or the measurement is wrong?
MYTHMAKING AND HERO CULTURES. Magical thinking prevents people from stating unpleasant truths for subtler reasons than the previous two factors. In tech start-ups, especially, cultural success myths are powerful, and they often relate to formulas or other numerical concepts that helped the company achieve success. Obviously there’s validity in these cultural stories, but at times the stories become sacrosanct and that’s when they become a problem (e.g., it’s heresy to speak against the company ethos or its leaders and founders).
When I joined Leo Burnett decades ago, I found an admirable culture of excellence, humility, and achievement reinforced by stories and symbols. Our logo had a hand reaching for the stars, accompanied by the founder’s statement, “When you reach for the stars you may not touch one, but you will not come up with a handful of mud either.” The logo and other symbols had an almost religious significance, and few would have spoken against this message; no one would have said we need to set realistic goals rather than reach for the stars.
I’m not criticizing these symbols and stories, only suggesting that they can have the unintended effect of inhibiting straight talk. At Apple, for instance, they still ask, “What would Steve Jobs do?” That may not be the right question today or in the years ahead because things change. Data-centric companies that have been highly successful are especially vulnerable to drinking the Kool-Aid, since people who work in these companies often have fierce beliefs in their technology, and they have trouble violating their sacred beliefs.5
The Value of Straight Talk
Before I offer some advice on how to put this first step into action, let me take a moment to note three organizational benefits of calling a turd a turd.
First, it increases the effectiveness of teams. Teams function best when they possess a sense of connectedness—a sense that often comes from trust and empathy. Straight talk fosters trust and empathy. When teams can’t confront problems or talk about sensitive subjects, they are engaged in a charade. Their members won’t be honest with each other or genuine about themselves. They may be smart and skilled as individuals, but they never generate the synergies that foster great ideas and great execution.
Second, it gets to the root of problems. Discerning problems in organizations requires developing and testing hypotheses, from realistic to speculative. This means taking risks, shooting down bad ideas, identifying who or what is causing problems. In other words, difficult topics must be brought to light. Toes may be stepped on in these activities. But this is the best way to figure out why something went wrong and start on the path to fixing it.
Third, it fosters creativity and innovation. When organizations are overly politically correct, when there’s fear of telling bosses the truth, when employees are so polite that no one is ever wrong, then no one wants to rock the boat. We’ve learned that disruptors are valuable, and when no one ever points out the turd on the table, disruption is rare to nonexistent.
For great ideas to soar, we need trampolines of trust—we need to know that even if we say something that is wrong or upsetting, we can bounce back. If these trampolines are not there, then no one is going to risk saying anything that might cause them to splatter on the ground.
If organizations need a model for turd-talking, they should look to their brainstorming and off-site meetings. At these meetings, people are usually told that there are no wrong answers and that they should not put down colleagues who say things they perceive to be off-point or dumb. They are also told that they can level with anyone and everyone, no matter what their titles may be.
Why do we segregate our ability to generate ideas and look at issues with piercing clarity to these off-sites? Why do we need inspirational speakers and role-playing to generate straight talk? It seems to me that organizations would benefit enormously if these were organizational policy rather than limited to a few special occasions annually.
Three Magic Words
My colleague Michael Donahue, who is a high-level, senior executive at the Association of National Advertisers, shared his belief that the most valuable assets in communicating were the following four-, five-, and six-letter words: data, trust, and intent (DTI).6
Do you have good data that supports your point of view? If not, why do you feel so strongly about surfacing an issue? Is it a combination of your experience and instinct (which can be forms of data)?
Can you be or are you trusted? Are you someone people believe is open and honest?
What is your intent?—i.e., why are you saying what you’re saying? Is it because you believe what you have to say will benefit an individual, team, or the company as a whole?
People who have all three assets are usually seen as possessing candor; they are willing to address uncomfortable or difficult issues. More to the point, they address issues with relevant facts and figures, are taken seriously because they’re trusted, and are perceived to have positive intentions (i.e., to solve a problem confronting a team rather than working from a political agenda).
Organizations must encourage trusted, well-intentioned, well-informed people to display this type of candor, no matter what their titles are. They can perform a vital role for organizations, whether it’s speaking up and stopping a problem that’s about to explode or disrupting business as usual with their candor. And even if they’re wrong—if a turd is not really a turd—they can clear the air by catalyzing a discussion of the touchy issue and flush it away if it proves to be unsubstantiated.7
Here are four ways organizations can encourage people to display candor:
1. Ask, “What if the opposite were true?” Leo Burnett originally hired me in 1982, after I wrote an essay as part of the job interview process, titled, “What If the Opposite Was True?” My premise was that unless someone can build a strong case for the opposite of what they say or believe to be true, they lack credibility; they’ve failed to analyze a given situation thoroughly. Similarly, I’ve always asked this question of myself before making an important statement or decision.
Organizations should train their people to factor oppositional thinking into their mindsets. When they consider the opposite of what they believe, they can surface all sorts of possibilities and risks that they may have never considered previously. When these opposites become conscious, they will more likely be articulated during discussions.
2. Model straight-talk behavior. When leaders and managers are willing to be consistently and sometimes brutally honest in their communication, their people are likely to follow suit.
3. Celebrate and incentivize turd-identification behaviors (rather than discouraging or punishing people). Give bonuses to those who display the most courage in identifying dicey problems or challenging their bosses with hard truths and disruptive perspectives. Recognize, too, that in most organizations, these behaviors aren’t incentivized unless an individual can provide irrefutable data to back up his or her point of view (and while irrefutable data is great, it’s often not available).
4. Discuss and use the DTI filter. Is there data to support the point of view (not irrefutable, but compelling)? Is the speaker generally trustworthy? Is the intent to help the team or the organization (rather than the individual)?
Today we’re living in a connected world, and innovation emerges from fresh insights. These insights need to be incubated in a safe, nurturing environment, and that environment is created when people feel free to say exactly what’s on their minds. They especially need to feel they have permission to challenge the conventional data wisdom—the statistical “truths” like who the company’s market is, the strengths of competitors, the economic trends, the software preferences, and so on.
Integrate Judgment and Savvy into the Data
As the previous paragraphs suggest, people are often unwilling to go with their gut—or even their experience—in data-dominant cultures. Consider how close many companies are to having AI make decisions for them. The attitude often is that “machines know best,” and so we allow data to connect to other data and come up with the answer. This is happening in every area of organizations.
In marketing, especially, analytics determine the look and content of advertising.
In finance, budgets are based on highly sophisticated numerical projections.
In human resources, everything from training to downsizing decisions emanate from statistical analysis of the value of each activity to the organization.8
Again, it’s not that these numbers are bad; they are crucial to companies today. But numbers have become omnipresent and in some cases are perceived as omniscient. There are social media numbers, financial data, website usage figures, algorithms that influence search results. They are embedded in strategies and cultures and policies and procedures, and they become stubborn things.
All employees need to wrestle with stubborn information rather than accept it as gospel. Why? Because as Plato said, “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”
I’d amend the philosopher’s statement to, “A good decision is based on knowledge and not solely on the numbers.”9
People won’t talk about the turd on the table if the numbers tell them that it’s a delicious brownie. Even if their instinct and experience are screaming that they should insist the brownie will not go down well, they will withhold this truth because their beliefs are nothing compared to the data.
Consider these two examples where leaders at Costco and Apple must have defied the data and relied on their gut to make decisions crucial to their companies—decisions in which someone identified the turd and moved their companies in directions that ran counter to the prevailing data-based wisdom.
If Costco paid its employees only by the numbers, those employees would receive less than they are paid today. To maximize profit, Costco could have paid closer to minimum wage; it was the spreadsheet thing to do, and it certainly helped Walmart achieve maximum profitability—for a while. But by paying higher wages, Costco ensured that its workforce would be happier and feel more valued; that in turn motivated them to go out of their way to help shoppers and to be more productive.
I don’t have the inside story of who made this decision at Costco, but I would bet this leader or team of executives decided to rely on their experience and instinct rather than just the numbers. Someone was brave enough to talk about the turd on the table—that paying employees less may be great for the bottom line in the short run but could hurt the company over the long haul.
Similarly, Apple made the costly decision to create their own stores at a time when direct-selling computer companies Dell and Gateway were industry leaders. From a spreadsheet perspective, this looked like a bad decision—retailers have a lot more costs than direct sellers. Again, I have no personal knowledge of the conversations that took place at Apple, but I would bet someone said something to the effect of, “Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but we need to build our brand, not just sell a hardware product. And my experience tells me the best way to build our brand is by giving people the opportunity to see and use our product, to create an environment reflective of the values we espouse. This means building stores—really nice stores—and that isn’t going to be cheap.”
How do you encourage people to combine their experience and instinct with the numbers to say what’s on their mind? By using what I refer to as the Three Limits Method:
ENCOURAGE DATA COLLECTION WITH LIMITS. In our data-rich world, people often refuse to make a decision or even venture an opinion until they’ve collected a “sufficient” amount of data. This focus on accumulating all available facts and figures is counterproductive in two ways. First, leaders and managers refuse to act quickly and instead procrastinate to the detriment of their organizations. Second, it discourages people from drawing on empirical evidence or playing hunches; they believe that experience and instinct aren’t scientific, and that if they just have sufficient data, they can make the right choices.
My advice: Collect often. Collect more. But collect fast. Set a time limit on gathering information. Don’t dither. Look at the data and then filter it through your own experiences and the experiences of other savvy veterans. Recognize, too, that you may as well impose limits since so much new information is pouring through screens daily that you’re never going to be able to accumulate all the evidence you desire for a decision.
REMIND EVERYONE THAT DATA IS INHERENTLY LIMITED. We tend to apotheosize data. As valuable as it is, if you treat it like the holy grail, you’ll become overly dependent on it. Perspective, context, theory, instinct, experience, and many other factors exist outside of the data, and you need to recognize them. When you receive that survey that spotlights an emerging trend or you’re studying the latest social media numbers, tell yourself that, as compelling as the data is, it’s not the whole story. View it as limited and you’ll be in the best position to use it effectively. Remind your people who rush in with the latest numbers that they need to take a breath and use their ability to interpret what these numbers might mean.
COMMUNICATE THAT PEOPLE WHO DEPEND ONLY ON DATA WILL LIMIT THEIR CAREERS. This limit is personal and serves as fair warning that they need to use their creativity, agility, and savvy if they want to prosper in an organization. When someone comes into my office and informs me they made a decision solely or primarily based on what a spreadsheet or other data source told them, I suggest they start looking for a new job since they’ll soon be unemployed as the age of algorithmic machines dawns. In this age, it’s imperative that people discern what a machine cannot do and augment it with their own analytical abilities. Machines will have more decision-making power in an AI world, but they are fallible and in great need of humans who point out errors, suggest alternatives, and communicate possibilities.
Five Best Practices to Encourage Table Talk
While organizations are quick to endorse the concept of disruptive thinking, they are not always so quick to encourage the practice of it. It’s a conundrum for leaders. As much as they value disruptors and know they are crucial for growth and innovation, many leaders also have been raised in the old paradigm where the status quo was maintained, the chain of command was observed, and teams in the trenches were seen but not heard.
As a result, cultures are not as receptive to people pointing out turds on the table as you might think (since turds are nothing if not disruptive). Challenging the status quo or the conventional wisdom takes bravery, and it’s tough to be brave if you think you might be punished or branded as not a team player.
For years newspapers did not see the impact of Google. They then refused to face the fact that online advertising dollars would never replace the offline dollars and that giving away the news for free, and therefore making people drop their offline subscriptions, was doubly tragic.
Smart companies that created amazing content, like Condé Nast, believed the shibboleth that content was king—despite the fact that in a world of social media and search engines, content was being commoditized. It was not the content owners but the people who pointed to content, like Facebook and Google, who were making money. Today Instagram is what Condé Nast could be. For years the incentive systems and cultures of these fine organizations were skewed to the past, and they lit and scented the turd to look like a brownie.
You would think organizations would understand that if someone does not speak truth to power, this truth will arrive via competitors who take away market share, or through a newspaper article, or through social media that spreads the rumor about the company’s unfair practices. Truth has a habit of breaking through whatever barriers companies erect, especially in a digital age. It’s better that the company facilitates the emergence of truths internally rather than externally.
Here are five ways to do so:
1. Anonymous tip lines or suggestion boxes. This is like training wheels for turd table talk. Yes, it’s old-fashioned, and employees may be skeptical at first about whether their suggestions will be read or acted upon, but it provides a starting point for people to voice their truths.
2. Leadership modeling of truth-talking. This is a simple but effective way to integrate truth-telling into the culture. At the end of every important meeting, meeting leaders should ask the following two questions: (1) Is there something that has not been said that should have been said? (2) Can someone please say why what we discussed or agreed on today might be wrong?
The Navy SEALs have a practice that after every operation, they have a debrief where everybody leaves their titles at the door. It does not matter if you are a newbie or a commander; everyone is asked to talk about what they and everybody else in the team could have done better.
3. Truth-telling incentives. Nothing aligns values and behaviors like incentives. Rewarding rather than punishing people who challenge the status quo with financial benefits, promotions, and verbal approval sends a powerful message. If you want people to take risks and challenge the status quo, you need to reward such people and such behavior. When I ran new small units for my company, they did not reward me on the size of the team or client or revenue we added but on other metrics more in keeping with our focus on tomorrow.
4. Admitting wrong. Bosses hate to say, “I made a mistake,” or “That was a dumb decision.” When bosses admit they were wrong, especially when they do so with humor and vulnerability, they convey it’s okay to admit mistakes and point out what didn’t work. Sometimes the turd on the table is a bad leadership choice, and when the leader points it out, it signals to others that it’s okay not only to admit mistakes but to note when bosses do something wrong. Every CEO I know has overcome significant boo-boos. They survived and thrived because they realized they were wrong and rectified their mistakes.
5. Storytelling. Dramatize the positives of identifying the turd on the table. Bring in outside speakers who can lay out scenarios in which organizations benefited when people started telling the truth.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Successful organizations and people ensure that diverse points of views are heard, even if they challenge the status quo or are disturbing in other ways. Many companies, from Wells Fargo to Boeing, could have avoided billions of dollars of damage had they allowed and listened to dissenting, disturbing viewpoints.
• Speaking truth to power requires both courage to speak and willingness to listen. Companies that foster these behaviors have trust- and relationship-building cultures—they create environments conducive to tough talk and hard listening.
• By asking for dissenting opinions, encouraging opposing points of views, and celebrating those who speak out even if they are wrong, organizations can facilitate talk about the turd on the table.